I just this morning read Condoleezza Rice’s report in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs. Interesting how she reported on our current foreign affair objectives without once showing us how Bush has screwed them all up. For example, on Page 7, she believes that the rise of an alliance of certain unnamed democracies in Asia along with Japan and Australia will counterbalance the increasing influence of China in that region. She forgets to mention that a recent poll in Australia shows that Australians trust China more than they trust America. So much for that alliance.
About Iraq, she writes that “the cost of this war in lives and treasure, for Americans and Iraqis, has been greater than we ever imagined.” (Page 21) I wonder if she or Bush or Cheney ever read any popular magazines, like Newsweek, for example, before they illegally invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq. I recall very clearly reading in many places and hearing on many TV shows just how costly our invasion and occupation of Iraq would be. Were some of our news media more astute and informed than the government which carried on the invasion? Humnnnn? Also under this heading, she failed to mention why we did not, therefore, invade other dictatorships whose practices were worse than Hussein’s.
She also continued to assert the now defunct reason for our invasion of Iraq, that is the presence of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein. She did this by going to the fallback position of the Bush administration, that Saddam was willing and ready to reconstitute his invisible weapons of mass destruction. Her assertion was an act of mind reading that surpasses the abilities of all previous American Secretaries of State, beginning with Thomas Jefferson and including James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams. (Page 21) I wonder if she’ll take up tea reading after her stint in American government?
Anyhow, I didn’t mean to make this an endlessly long recapitulation of Rice’s essay in Foreign Affairs. But you might enjoy reading it yourselves. Nowhere does she take Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld to task for their blunders and failures. I think this failure of nerve on her part makes the entire presentation suspect and weak.
Note how her paragraph, following, would be more honest if she just mentioned how our American values have been most compromised, not by liberals, but by you know who and his lackey and by Republicans in general since the start of the Reagan era:
“Ultimately, however, what will most determine whether the United States can succeed in the twenty-first century is our imagination. It is this feature of the American character that most accounts for our unique role in the world, and it stems from the way that we think about our power and our values. The old dichotomy between realism and idealism has never really applied to the United States, because we do not really accept that our national interest and our universal ideals are at odds. For our nation, it has always been a matter of perspective. Even when our interests and ideals [i.e. under the Bush administration or when Republicans invaded Chile and overthrew a democratically elected government] come into tension in the short run, we believe that in the long run they are indivisible.”
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